What The Rupp Medal Means

Monday, August 6, 2012, 11:47 am

by John Brant

In the flood of emotion following an ecstatic moment you tend to overestimate its importance. Four years from now, after the Ethiopians and Kenyans have swept the distance medals at the Rio Games, I may look back at these words and cringe.But now, with the image of Galen Rupp blasting past the Bekele brothers down the stretch to claim a silver medal in the 10,000 burning in my brain, I predict that Rupp's race will stand beside Roger Bannister breaking the 4:00 mile barrier in England in 1954, Kip Keino opening the Kenyan distance-running age with his 1500 victory at the 1968 Mexico City Games, and Joan Benoit shattering gender assumptions by winning the first women's Olympic marathon in Los Angeles in 1984, as a swing moment in the history of human endeavor. An imaginary, yet at the same time frighteningly imposing, limit on what's possible has been lifted. The location and circumstances of an individual's birth have once again been trumped by how persistently and intelligently she or he is willing and able to live, work, think, and dream.Besides Bannister, Keino, and Benoit, Rupp's achievement brings John Glenn to mind. Not that I'm equating the athlete's contribution to the astronaut's, but the two men's personalities seem strikingly similar: calm, steady, and practical to the brink of fault, their seeming blandness in a necessarily inverse proportion to the audacity and difficulty of their ventures.In 1961, when President John F. Kennedy announced the seemingly impossible goal of landing a human on the moon, NASA officials carefully chose the seven Apollo astronauts to carry out that mission. The best-known astronaut was Glenn, the first person to orbit the earth, who confounded journalists with his lack of flair. Glenn's style was almost plodding. He focused on the job at hand, was undeterred by setbacks, and willingly committed to a long-range plan that was at once rigorously scientific and wildly speculative.In 2001, when Alberto Salazar and other Nike officials announced the seemingly impossible goal of landing a native-born American long-distance runner on an Olympic medal platform, Salazar carefully chose Rupp, a teen-aged soccer player at the time, to carry out that simultaneously rational and maverick long-term mission. Over the last dozen years, Rupp has stymied the sports media in the same manner that Glenn frustrated 1960s newspapermen, with his eternal sangfroid, with his total trust in the wisdom and probity of Salazar, and a heroism showing in day-to-day attention to detail rather than the grand, dramatic gesture.Since 1962, travelers of many nationalities, and every type of personality, have followed John Glenn into space. Just as surely, in the years ahead, distance runners of any nation, and any type of personality, will follow the trail that Galen Rupp blazed on an August night in London in 2012. Rather than an accident of birth, world-class closing speed is a skill that perceptive coaches anywhere can teach, and devoted athletes of any nation can learn.